Ransom raised his eyes to mine and blinked. "Why don't I show you the picture that was taken the night she won that silly award? At least you can see what she looked like. You'll come to the hospital with me, too, of course, but in a way there's more of the real April in the picture." He jumped up and went out into the hallway to go upstairs.
I walked over to the Vuillard painting again. I could hear John Ransom opening drawers in his bedroom upstairs.
A few minutes later, he came back into the living room with a folded section of the Ledger in one hand. "Took me a while to find it—been intending to cut out the photograph and stick it in an album, but these days I can hardly get anything done." He gave me the newspaper.
The photograph took up the top right corner of the first page of the financial section. John Ransom was wearing a tuxedo, and his wife was in a white silk outfit with an oversized jacket over a low-cut top. She was gleaming into the camera with her arms around a big engraved cup like a tennis trophy, and he was nearly in profile, looking at her. April Ransom was nearly as tall as her husband, and her hair had been cropped to a fluffy blond helmet that made you notice the length of her neck. She had a wide mouth and a small, straight nose, and her eyes seemed very bright. She looked smart and tough and triumphant. She was a surprise. April Ransom looked much more like what she was, a shrewd and aggressive financial expert, than like the woman her husband had described to me during the ride to Ely Place from the airport. The woman in the photograph did not suffer from uselessly complicated moral sensitivities: she bought paintings because she knew they would look good on her walls while they quadrupled in value, she would never quit her job to have a child, she was hardworking and a little merciless and she would not be kind to fools.
"Isn't she beautiful?" Ransom asked. I looked at the date on the top of the page, Monday, the third of June. "How long after this came out was she attacked?"
Ransom raised his eyebrows. "The police found April something like ten days after the awards dinner—that was on Friday, the thirty-first of May. That unknown man was killed the next Wednesday. On Monday night April never came home from the office. I went crazy, waiting for her. Around two in the morning I finally called the police. They told me to wait another twenty-four hours, and that she would probably come home before that. I got a call the next afternoon, saying that they had found her, and that she was unconscious but still alive."
"They found her in a parking lot, or something like that?" Ransom placed the folded section of the newspaper on the coffee table next to the stack of books. He sighed. "I guess I thought I must have told you. A maid at the St. Alwyn found her when she went in to check on the condition of a room." There was something like defiance in his eyes and his posture, in the way he straightened his back, when he told me this.
"April was in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel?"
Ransom jerked down the front of his suit jacket and smoothed his tie. "The room where the maid found her had been empty all day, and someone was due to take it on that night. April got up to that room, or was brought up to that room, conscious or not, without anyone seeing her go into the hotel."
"So how did she get there?" I asked. I felt sorry for John Ransom and asked my stupid question to buy time while I absorbed this information.
"She flew. I don't have any idea how she got into the hotel, Tim. All I know is that April would never have met any kind of boyfriend at the St. Alwyn, because even if she had a boyfriend, which she did not, the St. Alwyn is too seedy. She'd never go inside that place."
I thought: not unless she wanted a little seediness. "I know her—you never met her. I've been married to her for fourteen years, and you've only seen a picture of her. She would never have gone into that place."
Of course, John was right. He did know her, and I had been merely drawing inferences from a newspaper photograph and what had seemed to me the striking degree of calculation that had created her art collection.
"Wait a second," I said. "What was the room number?"
"The maid found April in room 218. Room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel." He smiled at me. "I wondered when you were going to get around to asking that question."
It was the same room in which James Treadwell had been murdered, also by someone who had signed the wall with the words blue rose.
"And your detective doesn't think that's significant?"
Ransom threw up his hands. "As far as the police are concerned, nothing that happened back in 1950 has any connection to what happened to my wife. William Damrosch got them all off the hook. He killed himself, the murders ended, that's it."
"You said the first victim was found on Livermore Avenue." Ransom nodded, fiercely. "Where on Livermore Avenue?"
"You tell me. You know where it was."
"In that little tunnel behind the St. Alwyn?"
Ransom smiled at me. "Well, that's where I'd bet they found the body. The newspaper wasn't specific—they just said 'in the vicinity of the St. Alwyn Hotel.' It never occurred to me that it might be the same place where the first victim was found in the fifties until April, until they found, um, until they found her. You know. In that room." His smile had become ghastly—I think he had lost control over his face. "And I couldn't be sure about anything, because all I had to go on was your book, The Divided Man. I didn't know if you'd changed any of the places…"
"No," I said. "I didn't."
"So then I read your book and thought I might call just to see—"
"If I still thought that Damrosch was the man you call Blue Rose."
He nodded. That dead smile was fading, but he still looked as if a fishhook had caught in his mouth. "And you said no."
"And so—" I paused, stunned by what I had just learned. "And so, what it looks like is that Blue Rose is not only killing people in Millhaven again, but killing them in the same places he used forty years ago."
"That's the way it looks to me," Ransom said. "The question is, can we get anyone else to believe it?"
7
"They'll believe it in a hurry after one more murder," I said. "The third one was the exception I mentioned before— the doctor," said Ransom.
"I thought you were talking about your wife."
He frowned at me. "Well, in the book, the third one was the doctor. Big house on the east side."
"There won't be one on the east side," I said.
"Look at what's happening," Ransom said. "It'll be at the same address. Where the doctor died."
"The doctor didn't die. That was one of the things I changed when I wrote the book. Whoever tried to kill Buzz Laing, Dr. Laing, cut his throat and wrote blue rose on his bedroom wall, but ran away without noticing that he wasn't dead yet. Laing came to in time and managed to stop the bleeding and get himself to a hospital."
"What do you mean, 'whoever tried to kill him'? It was Blue Rose."
I shook my head.
"Are you sure about this?"
"As sure as I can be without evidence," I said. "In fact, I think the same person who cut Buzz Laing's throat also killed Damrosch and set it up to look like suicide."
Ransom opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Killed Damrosch?"
I smiled at him—Ransom looked a little punchy. "Some information about the Blue Rose case turned up a couple of years ago when I was working on a book about Tom Pasmore and Lamont von Heilitz." He started to say something, and I held up my hand. "You probably remember hearing about von Heilitz, and I guess you went to school with Tom."